Bonds Steady As Yellen Speaks

By Michael Aneiro

Bonds carried overnight gains into the trading day today, as an escalation of tensions in Ukraine has boosted safe-haven assets. That strength has held since Fed Chair Janet Yellen started speaking before the Senate Banking Committee, with the ten-year note up 8/32 in price on the day to yield 2.644%, while the 30-year bond is up 20/32 to yield an even 3.6%, per Tradeweb data.

Part of the reason the bond market hasn’t budged much is that Yellen is reusing the same prepared remarks in her Senate testimony today as she used before the House Financial Services Committee earlier this month. The two appearances were supposed to take place during the same week before a snowstorm postponed the Senate part. Speaking of weather, Yellen has so far said that it’s hard to tell exactly how much this winter’s harsh weather has been to blame for some recent weak economic data that’s been largely blamed on the weather.

Amey Stone is Barron’s Income Investing blogger and Current Yield columnist. She was formerly a managing editor at CBS MoneyWatch, MSN Money and AOL DailyFinance. Her responsibilities included overseeing market coverage and personal finance topics. Prior to those roles, she was a senior writer at BusinessWeek where she authored the Street Wise column online and contributed to the magazine’s Inside Wall Street column. Topics covered included economics, corporate finance, Fed policy, municipal bonds, mutual funds and dividend investing. She co-authored King of Capital, a biography of Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill. She is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.